Universities Commit to Racism By Philip Carl Salzman
https://pjmedia.com/columns/philip-carl-salzman/2020/06/30/universities-commit-to-racism-n587609
One of the famed universities in the world, Cambridge University, knows which side it is on. When one of its lecturers tweeted, “White lives don’t matter,” and then “Abolish whiteness,” the university defended her, and then promoted her to the rank of professor. When another instructor tweeted “White lives matter,” his contract was terminated. The anti-white lecturer was a female of color, while the instructor who thinks white lives matter was a white male. White males, as woke “social justice” activists tell us, are wrong, they are oppressors, and inherently toxic racists. Females, especially females of color, are deemed to be victims of white male oppression, and are always right.
Is there a word for thinking about people of different races differently? Ratism, raverism, ragusism? What about for treating people of different races differently? Discresionism, depressionism, deterentism? Whatever you want to call them, Cambridge University has them down pat, and so does every other university in North America and Western Europe. Racism has become official policy in every university, policed by the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” commissars who command thought and re-educate or exile dissidents, and by the woke politicians who give them their marching orders. And discrimination in favor of preferred categories of people is the new standard of “justice.”
Professors and administrators who speak out against woke orthodoxy are attacked and hounded out of their jobs by “social justice” warriors. The Michigan State University Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation was summarily fired for daring to question the benefits of diversity and the costs of canceling merit in science. Anyone today daring to recommend “colorblind” admissions and hiring, or saying “all lives matter,” is immediately labeled a RACIST! and fired. Only “correct” speech is acceptable to woke academics and cowardly administrators.
Affirmative Action: The Systemic Racism No One Wants to Talk About
There is systemic racism in our universities: it is called “affirmative action,” and its objective is to increase the number of underperforming blacks and Hispanics in U.S. institutions of “higher learning,” and indigenous natives in Canadian “higher education,” and females everywhere, while reducing the number of evil whites and offensively overperforming minorities such as East Asians and Jews. Affirmative action is as much about exclusion as it is about inclusion. Nobody in America or Canada got to vote on replacing individual rights with collective census category rights, or on the requirement that people from every category must be equally represented, notwithstanding their qualifications.
The rationale of affirmative action quotas is that any census category “underrepresented” in relation to its percentage of the general population, e.g. blacks 13%, Hispanics 16%, and females 49%, is underrepresented due to prejudice and discrimination, in other words, RACISM! and SEXISM! That many blacks and Hispanics have poor academic records is not of interest to the woke, or that their single-parent families and non-academic cultures are the true operative factors. Nor is the fact that females avoid science in droves, preferring the social science where they make up around 90% of the students and increasingly the majority of professors.
Although American citizens of all races strongly dislike racial and sex preferences in college admissions, political and educational elites continue to shove race and sex quotas down the throats of citizens. Political elites are actively trying to overturn earlier public referenda banning affirmative action and racial quotas. The recent pro-affirmative action Washington State legislative initiative was framed in stunningly misleading terminology but was defeated anyway. The current California legislative initiative to overturn its state referendum banning affirmative action is in process. Since the referenda banned affirmative action, universities have developed “workarounds” to avoid overt racial quotas but to nonetheless increase the numbers of members of preferred categories. At the University of California branches, the workaround is to prioritize recruiting students from economically poor students, which increases the number of Hispanics.
Canadian universities are scrambling to recruit indigenous native students and to hire indigenous native professors. If you are white, South Asian, East Asian, Caribbean, or African, forget getting chosen. At my old university, both indigenous natives and disabled students and professors are preferred. I have no objection to either category; in fact, two of the four members of my immediate family are disabled. But to make disablement a requirement for a post or funding? I have also seen what I believe is a double standard in the treatment of students: what I thought was subpar work from indigenous students was accepted and rewarded by other professors. In a principled academic university, all students would be judged by the same standards, and all posts and funding would be open to all candidates. These days, if our universities did not have double standards, they would have no standards at all.
The answer to prejudice and discrimination is not more prejudice and discrimination, it is no prejudice and discrimination. The answer to injustice is not a new injustice, but no injustice.
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